As China, the US and Japan near the finish line in exascale race, the DOE and NSA are sounding the alarm that the United States is at grave risk of losing its dominant position in high performance computing. According to the assessment of the two agencies, absent aggressive action by the US the US will lose leadership and not control its own future in HPC.

The long-predicted demise of Moores Law appears to be playing out. Over the last couple of years, Intel and other chipmakers have struggled to keep their semiconductor technology plans on schedule, paving the way for fundamental changes in the computer industry.

Applied Micro announced it is sampling X-Gene 3, its third-generation ARM SoC for servers. According to a report by The Linley Group, the new platform will provide comparable performance to the latest Intel Xeon processors, but at a significantly lower price point.

AMD announced this week it will being shipping its new Naples server CPU in the second quarter of 2017, hoping to disrupt Intels hegemony in the server market. The upcoming chip looks to be the first CPU from AMD to offer a credible challenge to Xeon in the datacenter in nearly a decade.

IBM has revealed its intentions to commercial its quantum computing technology being developed under its research division. Although the company didnt offer a definitive timeline or even a roadmap for the product set, it set down some markers on what such an endeavor would entail.

Behind the scenes of practically every weather forecast we encounter today are some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. An armchair analysis of the world's top systems reveals some interesting aspects about the HPC technologies and machinery being used to generate these forecasts.

The largest Internet company on the planet has made GPU computing available in its public cloud. Google announced this week that it has added the NVIDIA Tesla K80 to its cloud offering, with more graphics processor options on the way. The search giant follows Amazon, Microsoft and others into the GPU rental business.

If youve been tracking IBMs newsfeed lately, youll notice the company is expanding its cognitive computing strategy to encompass more and more platforms, not to mention customers. Recent platform upgrades include IBMs BlueMix cloud, private clouds in general, the internet of things (IoT), the z Systems mainframe, and even whiteboards.

Exabyte, a materials discovery cloud specialist, has published a study that compares Linpack performance on four of the largest public cloud providers. Although the studys methodology had some drawbacks, the results suggested that with the right hardware, HPC applications could not only scale well in cloud environments, but could also deliver performance on par with that of conventional supercomputers.

Thanks to a record fourth quarter, Cray posted a modest profit in 2016, representing itsseventh straight year of profitability. The company also recorded itssecond highest annual revenue in its history. Unfortunately though, Crayfinds itself in the midst of a lethargic supercomputingmarket, which has shown few signs of improving.